The Department and the University

The English Department faculty--60 full-time members, 6 part-time, and 26 graduate assistants--includes distinguished scholars, writers, and teachers in most areas of contemporary English studies. The diversity of their interests and backgrounds informs the courses that we offer at every level of instruction in the Department, including the wide range of classes in both our introductory literature and our undergraduate major programs. The Department is strongly committed to the quality of its teaching. We work hard to keep class size small, especially in courses in which a significant amount of writing is required. Twenty-one of our faculty members have won either the University of Hawai‘i Regents Award or a Presidential Citation for Excellence in Teaching, and another eighteen have won teaching awards from the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature. The Department is the site for the specially funded Citizens' Chair, which has been held by such eminent writers and critics as Leon Edel, Robert Martin, Lillian Robinson, Peter Elbow, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Albert Wendt. We also have traditionally had a position for a Distinguished Visiting Writer each semester, which has allowed us to bring to the Department such poets as Louis Simpson, Eric Chock, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Cathy Song and such fiction writers as Robert Stone, Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael Ondaatje, Sia Figiel, and Nora Okja Keller.

The Department holds a regular series of Thursday afternoon colloquia, at which faculty members, students, or local writers present an informal paper or reading, followed by a discussion. The Center for Biographical Research also holds a weekly noontime "brown bag" lecture by both on-campus and off-campus researchers on biographical projects. The Humanities Guest Lecture series brings other distinguished writers and scholars to the university; and the various conferences, special institutes, and colloquia sponsored in conjunction with the East-West Center, the Center for Pacific Island Studies, and the College have brought to the campus scholars, poets, fiction writers, critics, and theorists from all over the world. Among the many ways in which the faculty reach outside the Department, one of the most important is its published writing and scholarship, and we have a large number of scholars and writers who have attained national and international recognition for their work. The Department also houses or is affiliated with a number of scholarly and literary journals: Biography, the nation's pre-eminent journal in the area of life-writing; Manoa, a journal of Asia-Pacific writing; Hawai‘i Review, a student-run literary journal; and two journals of experimental writing, Tinfish and Chain. Long-standing affiliations with such organizations as the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council, the Conference on Literature and Hawai‘i's Children, the Hawai‘i Theatre for Youth, the Poets in the Schools program, and the Hawai‘i Writing Project reflect the Department's commitment to serving the community, and to the promotion of literature and writing throughout the islands. Serving a diverse student body and a diverse citizenry, the English Department offers a wide vision of English studies, and includes a variety of voices that reflects the diversity of activities and practices in the profession today.

Research Facilities

The University's library system contains about a million volumes. It is well connected to other libraries by the Internet, internal on-line, CD-ROM, and interlibrary loan resources, and can support research in most areas of British and American literature and culture, and world literature in English. Its Asian and Hawai‘i-Pacific collections in particular are among the most important in the world. A large addition to the main library building opened in 2001. Additional research resources are provided by the Hawai‘i State Library and the collections of the Hawai‘i Historical Society, the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society, the state archives, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and the Bishop Museum. For the convenience of faculty and graduate students, there is a small collection of reference materials and basic texts in the Green Room, the Department's library in Kuykendall Hall.

One of the University's computer laboratories is also located in Kuykendall Hall, just across from the Department office. Graduate students are welcome to use its networked collection of IBM and Macintosh machines for word-processing, library catalog searches, and to access the Internet, and knowledgeable help is available. The laboratory can also be reserved for instructional use by faculty teaching writing and other classes, and it can be used for the development and testing of software for computer-assisted writing and instruction.